In this month of February, when we celebrate Valentine’s Day, we think of love, and hearts. We need something to warm our hearts, especially with the winter we’ve been having.

A little 5-year-old boy named Liam Ramos in his now iconic blue bunny hat captured the hearts of Americans across the country. He was taken by ICE from his home in Minneapolis along with his father to a detention center in Texas. According to the district school superintendent, “This family is following US legal parameters and has an active asylum case with no order of deportation.”

When news of this spread, DHS immediately tried to spin the narrative, saying that the boy had been abandoned. Not the truth. He was being used as a decoy to get his mother to exit the house. After a major public outcry, little Liam and his father have been released from the Dilley detention center and thankfully are now home.

But what about the hundreds of other children being held there? Liam may have made friends with some of them during his incarceration there. He had to say goodbye and leave them behind. Children are innocent. Reports say that conditions are not that great in Dilley, although it is supposed to be more “family oriented.” Per figures obtained by the Deportation Data Project, ICE booked about 3,800 minors into detention from January to October 2025.

DHS, ICE, Border Patrol, whichever they may go by, are out of control. Our state and local law enforcement officers are trained to serve and protect, not harass, manhandle and beat up citizens. They are trained to de-escalate volatile situations, not murder citizens who get in their way. That is why these agents with their masks, camo, pepper spray and lethal weapons are not law enforcement. Their scope of authority is limited. They themselves need to have the law enforced on them. They resemble the so-called para-military groups that stormed the Capitol on Jan 6, unleashing their brutality on the police trying to defend it. They are brutalizing the citizenry across our country.

Some of this chaos can be attributed to the short eight-week training period these agents are now getting, in order to accelerate massive deployment into our cities. However, when the agents responsible for the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were identified, they were found to be veterans of the agency. What kind of hatred is being instilled in these agents to murder in cold blood a citizen posing no threat? A mother dropping off her child at school; an intensive care nurse at a VA hospital helping a woman they had pushed to the ground? Alex Pretti served our veterans. Our veterans did not serve our country for an authoritarian regime to take over.

Congress, including some Republicans, are calling for reforms to DHS and the resignation or impeachment of Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security. She has accomplished the opposite of that. This is the woman who shot her puppy in the face, remember? We need public outcry to hold her accountable along with the 3 agents who have been identified in the shooting of Good and Pretti. Investigations need to be called for in the many other deaths that have not made it into the public eye.

We are seeing some movement now in Congress, as a result of constituents keeping up the pressure to do something to rein in DHS, which has become an outlaw agency. The DHS funding was separated from the appropriations bill so that a major government shutdown would not occur and there would be time to negotiate some restrictions on ICE. If they can agree on some bare minimum requirements like no masks, badges, body cameras, judicial warrants; it will be a start, but a complete overhaul of immigration enforcement is ultimately going to be necessary.

Public outcry is the key. We are seeing some momentum in our favor. We need to keep it up. Successes like the release of little Liam add up. It’s the rising up of “we the people” that makes change. Throughout our 250-year history, the people have had to come to the aid of their country. As one of the aims set forth in the preamble to our Constitution, ensuring domestic tranquility has been hard to achieve when we are again and again having to combat the challenges to that tranquility. We can’t give up now.

There have been recent successes that have come from the rank-and-file citizenry of towns and municipalities. Residents who have packed town hall meetings, attended protests, boycotted businesses, have convinced local officials to halt the establishment of detention facilities in their localities. This is important, because if they build more, they will fill more. Don’t forget the Japanese-American prison camps of World War II.

We can take some encouragement from the lower courts ruling to uphold the law. The abrupt removal of temporary status of the Haitian immigrants was about to occur when a judge ruled a stay in the execution of that removal. DHS was about to descend on Springfield Ohio where the protected immigrants have been part of the community for over a decade and their country is still unsafe for them to return to. The people of Springfield by and large support the Haitian community which makes up a large percentage of their population and contributes to its economy.

Democrats have won recent local elections in red districts where voters are becoming aware that the Trump administration is not delivering the goods they promised. If we can keep up this trend, a Democratic House, and maybe Senate, can begin some reforms and hold this regime accountable. Trump’s poll numbers keep dropping, that’s a good sign. We have to realize; the Trump administration is the most corrupt and lawless one the U.S. has ever seen. This is a big job that we are in the midst of, but we can’t let up. The Trump regime keeps pushing the envelope, trying to see what we will let them get away with.

Every day, Trump is suggesting something crazy to distract us. So far, most of it has been TACO, he backs down. We didn’t let him go through with whatever it was. This doesn’t mean, though, that the likes of Steven Miller, Kash Patel, Noem, JD Vance, aren’t working their schemes under the radar. We need to worry about them too since they seem to be letting Donald while away his time with remodeling DC. And as the Epstein files come out, let’s make sure they aren’t shuffled out of the limelight.

So, this February, take heart. Keep the protests beating, keep the pressure on our representatives, and keep the love for a little boy in a blue bunny hat and all that he represents.

Susan Bigler is a Sheridan resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com